With strange exorcisms and super-heroic figures, mind trainings, hyper-fluid bodies and plant’s watering cans among others, Constanza Macras | Dorky Park and their guests interrogate what surviving could mean today, in a cycle of workshops and performances that will take place at DorkyPark – Studio 44 in Berlin between 27th of August and 15th of September 2016.

A feeling of powerlessness seems to be settling in the paralyzing fascination with the current nightmarish political landscape. The imminence of disaster, whether objective or subjectively perceived, is rejoiced in a contemplative manner, oscillating between ecstatic attitudes and an equally effective-less frenzy: if the end of the world approaches, will we watch blankly at the Melancholia planet approaching, as in Lars Von Trier’s film?

Protect me from what I want *

Moreover, we wonder: is our biggest threat coming from our own poor choices? As spectators, we “see” again and again how “wrong” decisions are being taken. As in the macabre devise of Hanecke’s movie “Funny games”, as long as we remain spectators and keep watching, we accept the devise as our own sadistic bourrau (executioner/torturer). Even when the standard codes of the medium’s illusion are ironically broken, the mechanics of our own “victimization” don’t weaken. It is as if our preservation instincts were disfonctioning simultaneously to our rational skills for assesing the better options.

It’s hard to know if you’re crazy if you feel you’re in danger all the time now *

It’s easy to laugh today at the first survivalists movements in the 50s and 60s and other dooms-dayers, with their caricatural images of people hoarding arms and food, ready to run into the mountains and kill their neighbors for a canned tuna. Or to those prepping for Y2K** and their massive fear of a technological glitch when passing to the year 2000: a glitch that would make all electronic infrastructures collapse, and the idea it could even cause a nuclear war by computer “mistake”. Yet, to revisit some of these cases today, might enlighten us about our abilities to deal with uncertainty, unknowability, and complexity.

Survival is perhaps that “singularity of thought without which we would be left with the “banality of evil” and “terror” (…) There is no other way to confront the forces of death, which are making headway today in the guise of religious extremism and the automatization of the species, than this capacity of survival (of being alive, as in sur-vie) rooted in the bliss of thinking and judging.” With super-heroic figures and strange exorcisms, mind trainings, hyper-fluid bodies and plants watering cans among others, Constanza MacrasDorkypark and guests commit to open up spaces for that bliss to happen.

* + ** in “Survival”, work by artist Jenny Holzer.
**In “Hannah Arendt or Refoundation as Survival”, by J. Kristeva,
(Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought. December 15-16, 2006, Bremen).

PROGRAM DAY BY DAY

RESIDENCY & PUBLIC SHOWING

IN THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY coreography and dance by and with Fana Tshabalala, Ana Mondini and Emil Bordáspart of SUPER LOCAL STORIES an artistic exchange between German and South African artists. Curated by Constanza Macras

A dance piece for the local community and research residency: a physical exploration inspired by the “impossible dialogue” between blacks and whites in Coetzee’s literature, and Njabulo Ndebele’s book “Rediscovery of the ordinary”.Fana Tshabalala (SA) is the 2013 Standard Bank Young Artist Award winner for Dance. Fana started his career with different community groups such as Vuku Zenzele Cultural Group (Assistant Director), Sonqoba Cultural Group (Performer), Pheelo Dance Company (Dancer) a.o. and he was a Dance director in Vuka African Artists. He is currently working at the FATC as a dancer, teacher, choreographer and associate artistic director. His solo and duo works toured extensively in South Africa, France and Germany.

“Little Show of Horrors” is a performance in which we will exercise exorcisms, manoeuvre meanings, sample images, play music, water the plants and flirt with order.

Ariel Efraim Ashbel (DE/IS) (b.1982) is a Berlin based artist from Tel Aviv. Since 2000 he directs projects in the gap between theater, dance, music and installation. Since 2011 he is based in Berlin, and has contributed to various projects in HAU Hebbel am Ufer, HZT Berlin (Uferstudios), ausland, the Berlin Biennial, the Berlin Porn Film Festival, Transmediale festival and more. He directed “All White People Look the Same To Me: Notes on the National Pornographic”, HAU (2013).

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WORKSHOP

TASKS ON SAVING THE SHOW workshop directed by Constanza Macras
Training and assistance by Miki Shoji, Johanna Lemke and Ana Mondini

Dance , improvisation composition and strategy workshop . A reflexion in the way how productive systems work and how we generate tools to make work possible. Dancers, choreographers, creators, performers face constantly the issue of surviving and what does it mean to the work itself. Is it the means we get what will shape a piece? Is to have to make constant political strategic moves to keep on creating? Is it to downscale or upscale choices? How do we survive in a performance? How do we perform stuff we hate? How we make ourselves believable on the work of others? How we create with nothing? How do we “save the situation”? The workshop will comprehend movement, text writing, filming and making music.

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I AM WITH YOU by and with Miki Shoji, Ana Mondini, Johanna Lemke, Nile Koetting, Emil Bordás and Fernanda Farah

I AM WITH YOU explores interpersonal relationships and exists of new formats of solos, Duos and trios which mash up with sequences of existing creations in an hour long performance. Constanza Macras gets in dialogue with her performers and shows the diary of a creative process and the final result in the performance to the public. Following the topic of reconstruction, fragmentation of the menonic process the dancers will transit how the materials come about and what it does to performed them.
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For the last years I have been developing a specific movement language starting from the idea of the monkey mind and the stream of thoughts. Monkey mind refers to the endless chattering in our heads as you jump in your mind from one thought to another as monkeys who jump from tree to tree chaotically. By searching the way our thoughts can be translated into movement I put the performer in a state of consciousness where the input or shifts of thoughts give him/her a specific rhythm and quality of movement. Using as well the content of these thoughts as gesture material

Lisi Estaras (AR/BE) sb. 1971, Cordoba (AR) studied dance in Cordoba (Argentina) and later on in Jerusalem in the Rubin Academy of Music and Dance. Later on she danced with the Ensemble Batsheva in Tel Aviv. Since 1997 Lisi works with les ballet C de la B. She danced in Iets op Bach,Wolf, vsprs, and pitié!, C(H)ŒURS and tauberbach by Alain Platel, and Tempus Fugit by Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui.Through the years Lisi developed her own work; she created and performed in Bartime (Campo, Ghent), Cocina Erotica and No Wonder with Constanza Macras (Schaubuhnne, Berlin). At les ballets C de la B, she directed Patchagonia, Bolero,The Gaza Monologues, primero-erscht and Dans Dans; a co-production between les ballets C de la B and het Kip (Ghent). The workshop is formatted as a short creation; warm up, composition, sharing of material and improvisations.

Funded by Fonds Darstellende Künste e.V. made possible by the German Federal Cultural Foundation and supported by the Governing Mayor of Berlin / Senate Chancellery – Cultural Affairs Department

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PERFORMANCE

I AM WITH YOU by and with Constanza Macras, Lisi Estaras,Miki Shoji, Ana Mondini and Johanna Lemke

An evening dedicated to women – In these two special performances Constanza Macras is performing with members of her ensemble DorkyPark (Johanna Lemke, Miki Shoji, Ana Mondini) and the guest dancer and choreographer Lisi Estaras. Together they will recreate some excerpts of NO WONDER a piece by Constanza Macras & Lisi Estaras created in 2003 about female superheros and females suicide poets.

Funded by Fonds Darstellende Künste e.V. made possible by the German Federal Cultural Foundation and supported by the Governing Mayor of Berlin / Senate Chancellery – Cultural Affairs Department